Reviews

New York Daily News: "Rootin' Teuton"

All during "Cabaret" I kept pinching myself. I was sure I must be dreaming. I imagined it was still 1967 and the American musical theater was still alive!

Here, after all, was Joel Grey, his clown white, pixie-featured face seeming no older than it did 20 years ago, his body still slithery and eerie. Here was a score slightly revised but far more powerful, and, most incredible, a book that is economical and absolutely solid.

Here I was having a fabulous evening when I had long ago persuaded myself that work of this caliber was no longer possible on Broadway. What had gone wrong?

Could it be that Harold Prince, most of whose recent work I have deplored, had recovered his perspective? "Cabaret," which was one of the first shows he directed, was in many ways Broadway's first foray into The Sixties.

It was a show about how politics affects a whole society (even its apolitical citizens). It was also a show about sexual ambiguity. In a society breaking down, the two things are related.

The fluid structure of the show, in which scenes in a sleazy cabaret reflect crises in the city outside (Berlin in 1930), remains impressive. The direction and performance have great sharpness. So does Ron Field's choreography, which captures the troubling mood sardonically.

The cast is sensational. Alyson Reed and Gregg Edelman are much more persuasive as two young Anglo-Saxons lost in this Teutonic "wonderland" than their counterparts 20 years ago. Edelman has a great new song, which he sings elegantly. When Reed launches into the title song, which, in context, is one of dark irony, the effect is devastating.

Regina Resnik, a class act in every way, gives a dignity and grace to the role of the hapless landlady that makes her plight much more poignant. Werner Klemperer is similarly refined, stressing the German rather than the Jew in his character, and important, deeply moving choice.

There are standout performances by David Staller, a chillingly appealing Nazi, and Nora Mae Lyng as a patriotic floozy.

Grey, of course, is triumphant. It is a performance concocted out of the lowest low comedy shtick, a vision of Satan having a go at vaudeville. When, at the very end, he appears alone on stage, the tacky trappings of hell having disappeared, the effect is hair-raising.

Prince has recreated a brilliant show brilliantly.

Howard KisselNew York Daily News10/23/1987

New York Post: "Grey eclipses"

Times change and people change. When the John Kander and Fred Ebb musical "Cabaret" was new in town 21 years ago, I felt, in the words of one of its own lyrics: "So What?"

Yes, even then, I thrilled and chilled to the demon-slick image, all raspberries and cold cream, of Joel Grey's fantasticated devil's puppet of a nightclub emcee, a performance clearly blasting out its own instant legend.

But the rest seemed to me at the time to be a cheapened, Broadway-packaged version of such 20th-century originals as Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht, Christopher Isherwood, George Grosz and even Lotte Lenya - who happened to be in the show's original cast.

Twenty-one years later. And either I have matured - at times I can be as slow as cognac - or the Broadway musical has so eroded, deteriorated and self-destructed that what was "So What?" in 1966 seems, in relation to the flatness of the surrounding countryside, "So Good!" in 1987.

Of course, even then, except for one case of kamikaze-style miscasting in the central role of that green-finger-tipped prairie oyster Sally Bowles, the musical was superbly done.

Quite a few of the people then superbly doing it are here the second time around, notably director Harold Prince, choreographer Ron Field and the show's star, Joel Grey.

The scenic designer Boris Aronson is no longer alive, but his designs, tactfully adapted, have been preserved in spirit by David Chapman; and Patricia Zipprodt has effectively tarted-up, as it were, her own original costumes.

The secret of doing any show the second time is either to do it completely differently - this is the sensible path to success - or, as here, to enhance it in tone and coloration to offset the always dulling comparison with memory's impossible brilliance.

Never leave well enough alone, because well will never be good enough on the return trip. This must be the motto that Prince, Field and Grey adopted for this new "Cabaret" act.

The Joe Masteroff book, based on the John Van Druten Broadway hit "I Am A Camera" that, in turn, was taken from Isherwood's "Berlin Stories," has now been changed slightly, more in accordance with the Jay Presson Allen and Hugh Wheeler screenplay adopted for Bob Fosse's movie version of "Cabaret."

The time is still 1929 (it was 1931 in the movie) and Cliff Bradshaw is still a young American writer coming to Berlin for experience, meeting the crazily voluptuous Sally Bowles and getting caught up with the rising tide of Hitler's New German Reich, with its anti-Semitism and violence.

But Prince now takes the slightly harsher tone that the movie (six years, note, after Broadway) adopted. Thus Cliff is now accepted as a bisexual - with no very strong heterosexual bent - and the Nazis' anti-Semitism is more pointed, particularly in the savage punchline of Grey's duet with a gorilla, as in the movie but earlier omitted on Broadway.

Other changes have come through the casting - the Sally, as given by Alyson Reed, is a much tougher little English cookie than that originally suggested by the miscast Jill Hayworth, and Werner Klemperer as the Jewish greengrocer, unknowingly on the brink of extinction, brings a more serious dignity, and less ironic pathos, to the role than did earlier the adorable Jack Gilford.

The structural fault of the show - as before glossed over by Prince's imagination and Aronson's invention - also remains, whereby the idea of "life being a cabaret, old chum" involves the story consistently being interrupted by numbers of relevant comic decadence but little brilliance.

There have been changes. Gilford's Jewish patter song, "Meeskite," has, inevitably perhaps, gone with Gilford. There is also a new duet, "It Couldn't Please Me More," and a rather strange ballad for Bradshaw, exhorting Sally: "Don't Go."

But generally the Kander and Ebb score still sounds derivative but chirpy. Even the title song, to me at least, seems to carry echoes of "Won't You Come Home, Bill Bailey?" and much of Kander's music, with the original orchestrations of Don Walker and the additional orchestrations of Michael (recent hero of "Anything Goes") Gibson, seems to have been subject to Weillification.

Personally I prefer something like "Happy End" to this pastiche, just as I prefer neat Isherwood to the dilutions of Van Druten and Masteroff.

All the same, "Cabaret" nowadays can seem pretty good compared with "Late Nite Comic" - Prince does a king-size job, and the present cast has its own qualities.

Reed, as Sally, sings strongly and acts with a convincing accent and rough charm - although she does not begin to suggest the radiant vulnerability of Liza Minnelli in the movie - while Gregg Edelman, looking like the young W.H. Auden, is quite marvelous as Bradshaw.

One misses, however, the authentic original wonders of Lenya and Gilford. Regina Resnik was more at home as Verdi's Mistress Quickly than here in the Lenya role of the landlady, and Klemperer is a somewhat dry stick as her greengrocer suitor.

I say oddly enough because in 1966 Grey was billed merely a supporting actor in the show - but he burst through like a rocket, becoming its shooting star and later dominated the movie.

Every actor returning to a role assures his public that he has found deeper layers in it to explore - I'm sure James O'Neill did just this with "The Count of Monte Cristo" - but in this instance it seems absolutely true. Grey is at least twice as good now as he was then.

When he started in "Cabaret," underneath all that blase bitterness was a kid striving to get out and become a Broadway legend. No longer.

The rictus grin hides no hunger, the puppet gesture of jaunty despair is just that, and the viciousness is without hope. Grey was always better than the show, and he still is.

He is never going to stop his role from being peripheral to the story, but more than ever he is central to the theme, giving it the backbone the show needs. For it is his character, which owes essentially nothing to Isherwood and his world, which gives the show its value.

Clive BarnesNew York Post10/23/1987

Replacement/Transfer Info

The following people are credited as replacements or additions if they were not credited on opening night.